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a neo-con con .....

You have stated on your website and confirmed in an interview with the BBC that “We (presumably that’s you as prime minister and President Bush) didn’t cause the Iraq crisis.”

The main cause of what is happening in Iraq today is, you said, the “predictable and malign effect” of the Western failure to intervene in Syria. And you are calling for unspecified intervention in Iraq. I presume you mean drone and other air attacks – war without American and British boots on the ground.

I think the leaders of all the major powers are to be condemned for allowing the slaughter and destruction in Syria to proceed, so I agree that intervention to stop it was needed. The question is – what form should intervention have taken?

In my view what was required at a very early point was a private conversation between President Obama and President Putin. In it Obama would have said to Putin something like, “What’s your price for requiring President Assad to stand down and make way for internationally supervised elections?” That’s the way an American president who was a real statesman would have played it. My speculation is that Putin would have responded positively on terms acceptable to Obama.

Now to your assertion that you and President Bush should not be blamed in whole or in part for what is happening in Iraq today.

In passing I have to say that I agree with Michael Stephens, an expert on Iraq and Syria for the Royal United Services Institute. He said that your war on Iraq played a big part in the fragmentation of that country. He added: “I think Mr. Blair is washing his hands of responsibility.”

I also agree with Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. from 1997 to 2003. In an article for the Mail On Sunday he said the handling of the campaign against Saddam Hussein was “perhaps the most significant reason” for the sectarian violence now gripping Iraq. He added: “We are reaping what we sowed in 2003. This is not hindsight. We knew in the run-up to war that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would seriously destabilize Iraq after 24 years of his iron rule.”

The bottom-line truth is that as the leader of Iraq’s Sunni minority, Saddam Hussein kept his foot on the throats of its Shia majority. In doing so he was serving what the West considered to be its best interests – preventing Iran from spreading its influence. The removal of Saddam Hussein brought about, predictably, the opposite.

I suggest, TB, that you didn’t give a damn about the consequences of removing Saddam Hussein because your agenda was determined by Zionism and its non-Jewish neo-con allies and associates in America. That agenda, public not secret, was removing Saddam Hussein, “rolling back” Syria and regime change in Iran. It was a grand strategy designed to guarantee that Israel would remain free to go on imposing its will on the region.

What you and Bush actually did was to set in motion what has become virtually a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia; a war that could have catastrophic consequences for the world, not just the region.

And one more thing, TB. I think those who described you as a “Bush puppet” and an “American stooge” were wrong. You are a neo-con. And it’s my guess that you colluded with America’s neo-cons to push President Bush to war. Could that be why you and your American neo-con associates don’t want the Chilcot Inquiry to publish the transcripts of your conversations with Bush?

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.netand tweets via